THE CONGRESS Pas de Dirksen

Senate pages rubbed ,their eyes in disbelief. In the galleries, tourists gaped. There on the floor of the U.S. Senate was Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, twirling around on tiptoe in an impromptu ballet solo. "Boys and girls, sit down," Dirksen ordered in mid-sashay. "We are going to show you how to operate a trucking enterprise. Get yourself a good look. We will show you choreography. Get yourself a good look."

Ev was not deranged but derisive. He was protesting the use of $52,018 in last year's anti-poverty program to give 480 needy teen-agers from Gary, Ind., a preview of potential occupations ranging, according to a Government handout, "from trucking to choreography and from graphic arts to oil refining." Still pirouetting as he addressed an imaginary teen-age audience, Dirksen cried: "You may be allergic to ballet dancing, or driving a truck, or operating a filling station, but have a look anyway. Be fascinated just to look at work." Even the pas de Dirksen failed to enlist support against the Administration bill requesting $1.5 billion to extend the war on poverty -the pending business of the Senate.

Veto Power. As passed by the House, the bill 1) authorized an expenditure of $1.9 billion, $400 million more than the Administration requested, and 2) stipulated that any decision by a Governor to veto community action, neighborhood youth corps or adult-education programs in his state would be subject to review by Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. The bill was fine by Senate Democrats, but the Republicans had different ideas.

Colorado's Peter Dominick, who thought it "absolute nonsense" to double funds for a program that "is so beset from the beginning to the end with problems," proposed an amendment to whack $553 million off the bill. Michigan's Pat McNamara, the bill's floor manager, argued that O.E.O. "is a new agency, in operation less than a year, designed to meet a gigantic problem -that of reducing poverty in the United States. To expect that there would not be problems in administration would be unreasonable." Dominick's amendment failed, 51 to 40. An amendment by New York's Republican Jacob Javits would have provided for public hearings on any disputed veto; it lost in a 45-45 tie.

Pungent Prose. Almost as startling as Dirksen's solo was a speech by Majority Whip Russell Long, who rose to attack another amendment that would have granted Governors the right to veto community-action programs only. Giving the South's segregationist Governors such lopsided veto power over anti-poverty programs, said Louisiana's Long, would expose them to unbearable pressures from "the Ku Klux Klan on one side" and "the Negro crowd" on the other. Long also charged that Northern Republican Governors such as Michigan's George Romney, New York's

Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania's William Scranton could use the veto power with a view to discrediting the poverty program. "These Northern Governors will screw this thing up so bad they can blame it all on Johnson," he charged. "This is a segregationist amendment. I understand that. I'm a segregationist boy."

Long's pungent prose helped the amendment's defeat by a narrow 43 to 42. Also defeated was Republican Javits' "two-hat" amendment, which would have forced Shriver, who leads the Peace Corps as well as O.E.O., to shed one of his two posts in the interests of efficiency. After four days of such debate, the battle-weary Senate approved the bill, with an authorization of $1.6 billion, 61 to 29; it now goes to a House-Senate conference for negotiation of dollar differences.

In other actions, the Congress:

>> Broke, after 14 House-Senate conferences, a nine-week deadlock over the 1965 foreign aid bill. In its final form, the bill authorizes $3.36 billion for aid in fiscal 1966, only $20 million less than the Administration's request. Most of the compromising was done by the Senate conferees, who dropped their demands for a two-year aid authorization (rather than the current one-year program) and a special planning committee to review the program. Grumped the bill's archfoe, Oregon Democrat Wayne Morse: "A complete surrender to the House."

>> Reported, out of the Senate Appropriations Committee, a Defense Department appropriation for the current year of $46.7 billion, including the $1.7 billion asked by President Johnson for the stepped-up war in South Viet Nam.

- Confirmed, by voice vote in the Senate, the nomination of former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Anthony J. Celebrezze as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

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